Using These Words Instantly Makes You Sound Less Intelligent Study Shows
A landmark 2006 study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology found that “a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence.” Of course for some, the habit carries on long after graduation. But to get to the bottom of whether complex words actually made people seem smarter, the study’s author, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, then a professor of applied psychology at Princeton University, designed a series of experiments....